Col. Don Thompson (Retired) told me about the time in WWII when he was forced to get his mortar unit out of the precarious position they had got into.

He and his men were under heavy continuous fire from German batteries. Their situation was perilous. Colonel Thompson crawled from mortar emplacement to mortar emplacement on his hands and knees as shells exploded all around him. Only after he had given the order to fall back to his unit, and watched as they moved out, did he jump aboard his jeep and follow, sustaining a deep shrapnel wound in his ankle which troubles him to this day, some sixty years later.

This is leadership at its essence — a leader who asked nothing of his men and women that he would not attempt himself.

What then are we to make of the loudmouth General Richard Hillier, Chief of the Canadian Defence Staff, who at the first hearing of bomb explosions, deserted his Canadian troops in their Afghanistan outpost, and allowed himself to be hustled away and out of harm’s way by helicopter.

I suppose this was a contemporary version of the old adage that generals watch from hills, while young men die in the valley. In any case, the extended photo-op for the media back home, ended in ignominy, with the General’s tail between his legs. General Hillier has been vocal in his bravado, cheering on Canadian troops in harm’s way and echoing the rhetoric of Stephen Harper, all of it borrowed from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld handbook of lies and duplicity.

True leadership is based on truth — in giving the people you put in harm’s way a reason to offer up their lives. That is not the way of Richard Hillier and George Bush. Theirs is the way of the false cause — a cause based on a lie.

Their technique is to divert and disallow criticism of war policy by posturing anti-war sentiment as a lack of support for troops defending “freedom” in faraway places like Iraq and Afghanistan.The rhetoric is always accompanied by encouraging lies that “things are getting better.”

In fact, “things” are demonstrably not getting better in either theatre of war, and there is nothing resembling democracy in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor is there likely to be. Things are getting worse. Much worse.

In Iraq, the insurgency has warped into a religion-based civil war between Sunni and Shiite Muslim sects, with the Kurds in the north sitting on the sidelines and watching the country fall apart. That is something they fervently wish would happen, because it would enable them to set up their own Kurdish Republic, their ultimate goal whatever form of government might emerge.

In Afghanistan, no one wearing a foreign military uniform is safe outside the capital city. This is a feudal country, a country whose politics are medieval in their practice, a country where warlord chieftains hold sway over their particular territories, each with his own army to enforce his rule. The real Afghanistan is out in the boondocks, in the impenetrable mountains and valleys where the opium poppy is grown, where the rule of law is supplanted by the rule of the rifle and the grenade launcher.

This is not democracy at work. There is no democracy here, only the rule of the Taliban and the warlords.

So let me ask the obvious: What in hell are 2500 Canadian soldiers doing in this very dangerous place anyway? Certainly not peace-keeping. What then?

The answer is not to be found in the overblown rhetoric of General Hillier and Stephen Harper.Mr. Harper visited the troops in Afghanistan to tell them he was behind them. Ah yes, well behind them where bullets and bombs cannot reach. Our new Prime Minister told his Conservative Party caucus last week that our mission there was…“an appreciable and appreciated contribution on the international scene…And that is why we stand foursquare behind the work, the hardship and the sacrifice of our young men and women in uniform in Afghanistan.”

That rhetoric, like almost all the Harper utterances, is taken right out of the George Bush-Dick Cheney playbook, designed to divert questions about dubious policy into chest-thumping patriotism, if not jingoism.

And that avoids questioning certain hard realities. For what we are doing there is what time and again has been proven cannot be done. There is simply no way a foreign force of trained soldiers can ever win any kind of victory against an ingrained indigenous assemblage of fighters who know the territory, are well versed in guerrilla warfare, and are fired by a warped version of their Muslim religion. No way. No way at all. Just ask the Russians. Or the British before them. No foreign force has ever imposed anything on the Afghans. They have only left the blood of their young men and women to stain the hard and rocky soil.

The Canadians are not even pursuing the “terrorists” of Osama bin Laden. They are just as often taking on fighters from the Taliban, who once ruled the country when they aren’t fighting the elusive minions of the warlords and poppy kings.

What we are really doing there, along with troops from other nations, is providing relief for George Bush as he fights another unwinnable war in Iraq, a war now opposed by nearly three quarters of his own people. In Afghanistan, Canadian troops are replacing American troops diverted to Iraq. In Iraq, the holy quest to impose democracy on a population, is failing — and failing fast.

Last week, the New York Times, once a supporter of the war, opened its lead editorial with this comment: “Iraq is becoming a country that America should be ashamed to support, let alone occupy. The nation is sliding closer to open civil war. In its capital, thugs kidnap and torture innocent civilians with impunity, then murder them for their religious beliefsâe¦ The Bush administration will not acknowledge the desperate situation.”

In Britain last week, Condoleeza Rice, the American Secretary of State, was booed everywhere she went. In Washington, the octogenarian reporter Helen Thomas rent the veil of the Emperor Bush with a single question. “Why,” asked Ms. Thomas, “why did you want to go to war from the moment you stepped into the White House?”

“You know I didn’t want war,” replied the President of the United States of America, and his nose grew another several inches longer. There is so much indisputable evidence, much of it from British sources, that Bush-Cheney in absolute fact conspired to launch a war that it is almost comic that Mr. Bush would even bother to deny it any longer.

What has now happened in Ottawa is that Mr. Bush has another head of state to join Tony Blair as a pair of well-trained ideological poodles amiably trotting along at heel, as he descends into the recriminations that will follow the greatest failure of American foreign policy in the history of that country.

As the American journalist Richard Cohen writes in the Washington Post, “Bush wanted war. He just didn’t want the war that he got.”

It is a war that is rapidly descending into chaos so he re-gifted it to us.

Thanks Dubya.